


Prologue, Act, and Epilogue

by Leonawriter



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Wutai War, this is your reminder in fic format that Shinra literally created child SOLDIERs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 09:23:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16447157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leonawriter/pseuds/Leonawriter
Summary: A brief look at most of Genesis' life. When looked at from his point of view, it only makes sense that his life both came together and fell apart the way that it did.





	Prologue, Act, and Epilogue

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired heavily by how I'd made a long-ish post on how some people don't like seeing Genesis, Angeal, and Sephiroth as twenty at the start of Crisis Core, but to me it just makes far too much sense.

 

Genesis Rhapsodos is eight years old, and as far as he knows the world is covered in dumbapple trees and everyone who’s important listens to his parents, and whenever he wants something, he asks for it and it’s given to him.

He’s eight years old, and sometimes he feels as though his parents never really wanted him, and he doesn't fit in, and the world is too small, because it always seems bigger in the stories he hears about and reads about, and that the old people tell around the fires on the festival days.

...

Genesis is ten years old, and he finds another boy pretending that he hasn’t just filched someone else’s apples out of their tree - but it isn’t _his_ trees, so it’s okay - and they start to argue over things, but before long, they’re laughing, and not long after that they go back to arguing again but it’s a much more fun kind, and he decides that he kind of likes it.

A while later, after seeing the massive sword that’s wider and taller than he is in Angeal’s house that belongs to his father, finds the two of them whacking at each other with sticks, and he winds up covered in bruises that he feels for days on end later, days that feel like they’ll carry on forever and ever.

He doesn’t stop, though, just makes sure he picks a better stick next time, and learns how to dodge better, in between learning how to make apple juice, because one day he was going to go away from here, and when he did, he still wanted to be able to take the taste of those apples with him.

...

Genesis is twelve years old, and he hears of someone his age (although they list off his birthdate and he’s even younger than _Angeal_ , which makes Genesis older than all of them, which he thinks counts for something) who’s talked of as though he’s _amazing,_ like he’s some kind of hero, and he thinks back to the caves he’d found and the stories written in stone.

His parents frown over him when he says that he wants to go to Midgar one day, and be a SOLDIER, just like that, to be a _hero_ , just like in the books. They tell him he’s good at tending the orchards, and he’s good at keeping the accounts straight. He could take over, if he wanted, one day, if he just kept at it.

But they tell him that it’s his choice.

Part of him thinks he should love them for that, and part of him wishes they’d fought back more, and part of him just doesn’t care what they think, and feels like they probably don’t care too hard back at him, too.

So he begins to spend more time ‘training’ with Angeal - hitting him with sticks, sometimes ones that the old people had cut and carved for them, sometimes ones that’d fallen off the dumbapple trees - and less time learning how to make apple juice.

He still wins an award for the apple juice.

...

* * *

 

Genesis is a SOLDIER Third Class at fifteen, and it’s harder work than he thought it would be, much harder than hitting another boy with a stick once every few days, or even every other day, but he makes himself not stop for anything.

He has a habit of looking down on the other boys and girls in their groups, because so many of them seemed to not know a clue about how to handle themselves after their enhancements, or how to hold a sword so it balanced right, or how to dodge, or how to make someone think you were dodging but you actually weren’t.

He also looked down on them for the way they rolled their eyes at him when he’d steal off to the library to read just about every book in the entire building at least once, losing sleep over it enough that he learned how much you could go without when you’d been enhanced.

He always kept a copy of LOVELESS at his bedside, though, because even though he knew it by heart - better than by heart - it was comforting, and familiar.

He picks up an apple at lunch, and makes a face at it, because it’s too sweet, it’s too sharp, it’s too- _not right_ , and to make up for it, he buys enough Banora White Apple Juice to last both him and Angeal at least a few weeks. He could have asked his parents, but they’d take a while to ship it over, and if they sent actual apples, they’d have gone weird by the time they got here.

...

Genesis is sixteen the first time he sees war in all of its glory, and the words _When the war of the beasts brings about the world’s end, the Goddess descends from the sky, wings of light and dark spread afar, she guides us to bliss, her gift everlasting_ circle around in his head.

The first time he’s injured and it’s not a training accident, it _burns_ , and it _hurts_ , and he wonders silently why it feels like that when everyone else seems to just ignore it and carry on, why when _he’s_  hurt it seems to take so much longer, but he doesn’t ask, because if the answer is something simple and obvious, he doesn’t want to be made a fool of when being _smart_  was one of the things that he prided himself on, even in SOLDIER.

The first time he hurts someone else and it’s not just a training accident or a dummy, he freezes, and someone shoves him behind them, and he calls himself stupid and tells himself that _heroes don't freeze up_  a dozen hundred times. He ignores the older SOLDIERs who tell him that it’s normal.

The first time he kills someone, he isn't even thinking about it. He’s remembering about the way that he’d played with sticks when fighting Angeal, and the way that they’d practiced the same move in training, and he executes it _perfectly_. His sword finds its way into the other person’s chest, and he remembers the way he’d been taught to free it from the body (using old sacks of flour and dummies made of straw) and all he can think of is the way that it was the first time he’d perfected the move.

Until he notices that his sword is covered in someone’s blood, which isn’t just shimmering away in the training room’s holographic light, and the body wasn’t moving or fading away, and suddenly there’s something sharp coming at him and he has to block, or else he’ll suffer the same fate.

The first time he kills someone, he kills five people and later, no one finds out who threw up behind the Seconds tent.

He tells himself _they were the bad guys, and heroes don’t cry over killing the bad guys._ But that doesn’t help, so he just makes himself not think of it instead, and that helps better.

...

Genesis is seventeen, and he’s turned the tide of so many battles he’s begun to lose count, and he’s congratulated over how many men he’s saved, how many of the enemy he’s managed to subjugate, to bring down, words upon words that mean _you’ve killed so many people_ , and they pat him on the back, and it’s a sort of recognition that he finds himself craving more of.

Angeal has begun to go quiet, sometimes. 

But it’s nothing like the way that Genesis buries himself in LOVELESS and in strategy and in supply trains and the useful kind of science that you can win wars with, nothing like the way that he flaunts himself off, with his black uniform and his red coat, so he doesn't understand what it means.

It’s been a while since he first found himself fighting alongside Sephiroth himself, a while since he’d ghosted the other - younger, but paler and slighter and taller - boy, and made himself be listened to with all the grace of one whose parents were always thought of as important.

Part of him still looks up to Sephiroth, even now, and glares at Angeal when he sees his old friend smirking in the corner of his eye. 

Part of him feels like he’d do _anything_  to get him to actually notice him, to not just be yet another opponent hardly even worthy of the great Sephiroth’s time or attention.

Sometimes, he likes the way it feels to be able to have someone new to share LOVELESS with, and to tell old jokes to, and he can’t help but find it funny the way although Sephiroth can fight like the silver demon the Wutai call him on the battlefield, when it’s someplace more mundane, Genesis sees the way he fights to not make it obvious that he’s still getting used to those long legs of his.

...

Genesis is eighteen, and he has been the commander of more battles than he knows what to do with. Some of them are even named. Many of them were _publicised._ For some of them, he fought alongside Angeal. With others, Sephiroth. Few were spent with all three of them.

It was starting to become noticed that they were the best of the Firsts, the cream of the crop, the strongest of what SOLDIER had to offer.

This gave certain perks, non of which he was willing to turn his nose up at. Such as a fan club (which his parents funded), and a certain amount of notoriety around Midgar, and more interesting missions even when not out on the frontlines.

He’s asked to attend certain functions, alongside the others, to be one of the _faces_  of Shinra, and he thinks that he handles this better than Sephiroth with his wooden face, or Angeal who’d much rather be behind the camera than in front of it.

His face is put in the papers. His name is put in the stories they tell.

But it’s _Sephiroth’s_  name that’s put in the headlines, and although he feels that it’s only to be expected, he also feels that it isn’t fair, because some of those things they say he did, are things that  _Genesis_ did.

He doesn’t say anything, though, because he hears enough to understand; that’s just simply the way that it is.

He decides that he’ll simply have to do something bigger, and grand enough that it can’t help but be noticed, one day, and no one will forget him.

...

Genesis is nineteen years old and growing increasingly frustrated, because nothing he does seems to work, and the last time, one of his ideas wound up with him and several other SOLDIERs under a landslide, one that the regular army men among them hadn’t survived.

He’s still feeling sore days later, bruises and mako burning under his skin, and he doesn’t ask if anyone else feels the same, because he’s not a kid anymore, he can handle a little pain. 

People died for these victories. For _his_  victories. Their sacrifices will be ones that will count for something, though. He promises them that. Not in as many words, but by knowing that there’s a chance they won’t all come back from this, and he’s going to be right there with them, their best and brightest spark right at the front lines.

He sees Wutai begin to weaken in the maps and in the letters and in the reports, and he knows in his bones that it’s all down to what he and Angeal and Sephiroth were doing - not _just_ Sephiroth, as the papers tried to say - and he feels like a part of something bigger, a part of history in the making.

If he’s figured this out right, there might only be a few more battles until it’s all _over._

Although if he’s honest, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with himself once it’s over. 

Perhaps he’ll turn to acting. Or he’ll finish up those papers he’d been writing on LOVELESS, and post them in to be printed, because there’s got to be somewhere that’d print it all out. 

...

Genesis is twenty years old, and spends his twentieth birthday in Banora, and eats an apple that’s fallen from one of his own trees, because no one’s there to care that it won't go where it’s supposed to.

The apple tastes just right, even though his arm stings from the needle-holes that Hollander had put in it to take samples of his blood, and his shoulder _aches_  still, weeks on, long after it was supposed to have healed already by now.

At least he knows why now, though. 

He’s twenty years old, and he’s been through a war that he’s all but given up on, and he’s never felt his mortality so keenly as he does now.

He remembers getting into an argument with his parents - first his mother, then his father came to join them, wondering why their son was here instead of where he was supposed to be, then horrified at the fact that he _knew the truth_  - and one moment he’s furious, and the next they’re looking at him, sad and sorry and full of pity that he doesn’t want to see, because it was too late, it was _all_  too late.

Too late for them, and too late for him.

Some part of him hates the fact that Hollander was more angry at the fact that it was an inconvenience than that he had just _killed his parents_ , but in a sense that was useful, because it gave him something else to focus on.

The Turks were easier to kill, and he didn’t find himself throwing up out the back of his too-big, too-empty house afterwards, because now that Shinra was the enemy, the Turks were too, and heroes didn’t feel bad about killing the bad guys.

...

Genesis is twenty-seven years old, and has spent far too many of those years under someone else’s beck and call. So when he’s taken, so soon after he’s been restored to health and rejected at the same time, at the exact time when he wants nothing more than to be _left alone_ , he’s not in the mood to listen to people who just want him to be _compliant._

There’s something else there, too, something that balks away from the idea of being trapped like that in this place, and by their words, unable to escape, to be his own person, to figure out for himself who _Genesis Rhapsodos_  truly was, could truly _be._

He refuses them. He could have had control, in a sense. He could have used whatever connection they gave him, if that were possible. But instead, all he wished was to run, and to hide, because if there was one thing that was true of himself over the past nearly-a-decade, it was that he had become a twisted monster who hurt people.

Twisted monsters, he knew, could not be heroes. 

So he seals himself away, more like one of the evil villains in a fairy tale than anything, in the knowledge that if anything ever awoke him, then it would have to be because the world was ending, or because they needed someone like him, his strength, when all else to turn to was gone.

...

Genesis is thirty-one, and he watches the children playing in the street, and a stray thought knocks him sideways, that these were children who had hardly known _peace_ , but who were not expected to go to war, were not expected to be SOLDIERs, children half his age who’d never killed and might never kill anything other than a monster.

He’s beginning to feel less like one himself, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling that perhaps what Hollander had done to his genetics wasn't the only irrevocable harm that Shinra had done to him, before he could even understand what was going on.


End file.
